Habagat in cyberspace

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

One of the many things that the nameless watery catastrophe that visited the Philippine capital and its neighboring provinces taught us was the good and bad side of social networking. It proved to us the power of micro-media messaging that is the Twitter, which was the platform through which our disaster mitigating efforts used to do their jobs.

In a larger scale, there was also Facebook, where we saw the images and other visuals of the pain and difficulties that that calamity wrought. Of course, there were the websites, where we read up-to-the-minute updates of the situation in Manila. I guess the Pag-asa site was most popular, but for those who found the Pag-asa reports a bit too technical, there were also the online news sources like the Inquirer and Rappler that delivered news just as fast, and in more comprehensible language.

It was remarkable, for example, how we all knew that the Marikina River swelled very fast dawn of Thursday, and the alarm for residents to evacuate it had been sounded as soon as they happened – thanks to online news that posted this instantly.

While we couldn’t rush out and help the endangered on the edges of the Marikina River, it allowed us, and the rest of the world, to fall on our knees in supplication to spare the people there from further hardship and more woes.

On the flipside, however, the habagat episode also showed us the weakness of cyber platforms as news sources in times of calamity, and I hope we can address this just as we are trying to find ways to build catch basins for flood waters.

And the problem in cyber news sourcing was this: the usual unscrupulous people unconscionably playing tricks on the unwitting. There were false tweets that led rescuers to dead-ends, improper jokes that launched operations where there shouldn’t be.

On FB, where friends seemed to be in an unwritten contest to show the worst image or the most extraordinary shots of the deluge, fake photos abounded. One of the most outstanding forms of disinformation was this utterly beautiful photo of Manila in shades of blue, gray and black, with ostensibly storm clouds hanging low over its buildings. It was a shot straight out of those Armageddon movies where the cities of the world are torn by disasters – think The Day After Tomorrow – and you turn emotional seeing it.

Except that somebody said it was retouched by the wonders of photoshop and still another one said it was at least 10 years old, showing a building that was still under construction. I don’t know the truth about these claims – but that is a glaring example of how difficult indeed can things get in cyberspace, how unreliable news updates there can be.

And how vulnerable cyberspace can be for media manipulation. Aside from the examples above, there were also comments about how the photos posted by FB friends were not taken during the recent flood, but during the Ondoy disaster.

Of course, it is up to us to verify or check the veracity of the things we read and see online, but that takes time, and removes the power that makes cyber news such a helpful platform. By having to check and countercheck the facts presented there, we waste time, and the strength of the Internet lies in the speed with which we could send messages to each other there.

After all, in times of disaster, speed matters a lot, because minutes, or even just seconds, can mean life and death.*

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